Gary Becker, legal feminism, and the costs of moralizing care.

AuthorTsoukala, Philomila

Feminist theorists in a variety of fields have contributed unrelenting energy and invaluable insights to academic and policy-making work on the issue of women's unpaid work as homemakers. (1) Indeed, feminists have been struggling with the problem of housework, its valuation, and its (non-) remuneration for as long as feminism has been around. (2) As economic theories of the household have developed, so have the feminist responses to them. This article explores the tension between economic methodology and the premises of certain schools of feminist thought, focusing on the reaction of legal feminists to economic thought in the context of the care work debates.

Legal feminists in the 1970s and '80s were concerned with the ways in which law reinforces women's subordination in both the family and the market, especially through the endorsement or toleration of sexual violence and discrimination. (3) Discussions of the value of "homemaking" revived in the legal domain right after the no-fault divorce revolution and the consequent preoccupation with the financial destitution of divorced homemakers. (4) Legal scholars debated alimony in the no-fault era and sought to redefine its basis in a way that would lead judges away from the idea of alimony as an award based on need. (5) They proposed a variety of approaches as improvements over the need-based one, such as a contractual theory of marriage that included rewarding a reliance interest and encouraging efficient breach (6) and a more traditional partnership theory. (7)

The alimony debates of the '80s developed into a broader debate--the care work debate--in which feminist scholars began to frame questions regarding alimony and property division against the backdrop of the allocation of costs for dependent care (children, elderly, infirm) in both the family and the market. (8) At the same time, the idea of housework as economically productive came to the fore in large part due to the influence of economist Gary Becker, the father of the school of "New Home Economics" that flourished from the late '60s through the '70s. (9) The economic concept of housework as productive reinforced existing concepts of marriage as a partnership and started playing an important role in the debates over the allocation of the costs of dependent care. In addition, the economic emphasis on the valuation of household work became aligned with increasingly strong cultural feminist voices theorizing women's relationships to an "ethic of care" and the traditional undervaluation of this ethic through androcentric bias. (10)

However, the alliance of economics and feminism has been an uneasy one. Although feminists use economic methods or conclusions, they have repeatedly criticized economics as a tool limited in its usefulness for feminist purposes. Feminist scholars have produced a number of compelling critiques of economic methodology, (11) specific policy proposals, (12) and the male domination in economics as an academic field. (13) However, many feminist thinkers repeatedly returned to the idea that something about economic rationality makes it particularly inept at capturing the realities of family life, and some even suggested there is something inappropriate about the use of economics to describe family life or women's labor. (14)

This Article argues that although some of the critiques of economics--especially normative economics--are warranted, many of the feminist objections to the adequacy or desirability of economics as a tool for capturing family life can be traced to feminist impulses that tend to entrench the male/female dichotomy in a number of ways. (15) The goal is to highlight the insights that feminists can gain from developments in economic thought and reclaim the assumption of selfishness as a core part of "methodological individualism" (16) and a useful and appropriate tool for feminists.

This Article responds to a growing trend in legal feminism to moralize women's work in the family in the attempt to get greater benefits for the women who perform it. It revisits the work of Gary Becker, analyzing the reactions to his work by feminists working within economics and law, and proposes a reading of his theories that pinpoints the elements useful for feminist purposes. The Article further examines the reception of economic work in the legal field in the context of the care work debates. It reveals that, upon closer inspection, feminist proposals to remunerate household work because of its productive but unpaid character rely on an idea of household production that sounds in economics but ultimately borrows little from economics as an analytic method. Rather, many legal feminists' ideas of household work as productive rely on an underlying moralization of the family, dependency, and women's roles in both. This tendency to moralize conflates women and mothers, mothers and children, and mothers, children, and poverty, and only makes analysis of the issues at stake more difficult.

The Article consists of three parts. Part I develops a critical examination of developments in the field of household economics. Stepping out of the feminist tendency to regard mainstream economic methodology, and Becket's work in particular, with suspicion, (17) it offers a close reading of Becker's work to produce a feminist critique that engages his ideas internally, without hinging upon normative assumptions about women's relationships to empathy and care. It retraces feminist reactions to the school of "New Home Economics" to separate the elements of these critiques that are useful and to the point from those that can be attributed to disciplinary assumptions specific to feminism. Part I concludes by proposing some elements of economic work post-Becket that provide useful insights to feminist theory.

Part II presents an analysis of the modes in which economic thought has been received in feminist and legal feminist discussions to show that although some feminists appropriate conclusions from economic thought that they believe will be helpful to feminist policy-making, they consistently convey a deep ambivalence about economic methodology. This Part examines the arguments that feminists have been exchanging in the context of the care work debate, which has been revitalized over the last fifteen years, to locate feminist reactions to economic analysis. This examination reveals that cultural feminist understandings have predominated, setting the tone not only for what kinds of policy proposals feminists can put forth, but also for what modes of argument a "good" feminist should put forth. Feminist resistance to and partial appropriation of economic thought can be best understood against the context of this growing cultural feminist consensus on women's work.

Finally, Part III offers an articulation of the costs of this consensus and how developments in economics and feminist economics might help us rethink it. Becker's altruist and the negotiation models that followed can actually help to refocus attention on women's agency and the "carrots and sticks" that make a gendered division of labor persist, even within the framework of a dual-earner family. More broadly, economic methodology can help articulate the potential consequences of legal reforms on different groups of women and men.

  1. GARY BECKER, FAMILY ECONOMICS, AND FEMINIST THOUGHT

    1. The New Home Economics

      Gary Becker is a Nobel Prize winner. (18) Everyone who has read family law literature in the past ten years knows that. Without actually reading Becker's work, however, the family law reader will learn little beyond this minor fact. She may have some general idea about Becker's role as a pioneer in bringing economics into the family realm and as an avid legitimator of the patriarchal family. In reality, Becker's writing on issues related to the family has been extensive, (19) and he is one of the most frequently cited authors in economics and family law, including the fields of feminist theory (20) and law and economics. (21) As Robert Pollak, one of Becker's most prolific critics--and continuators of his work--within the field of economics, put it: "In its contemporary form, the economics of the family is Gary Becker's creation." (22)

      The two aspects of Becker's work that have provoked the most active controversy in the field of family law and the most intense condemnation from feminist theorists are his theories regarding the sexual division of labor (23) and his "altruist" model of the family. (24) The former purports to explain the widespread sexual division of labor observed even in modern liberal societies on the basis of sex differences that, according to Becker, make this division efficient. (25) His altruist model, on the other hand, is an effort to formally model the ways in which "altruism" in the family leads to coordinated behavior. (26) I will briefly sketch the main elements of Becker's theories before analyzing the reactions that Becker provoked among feminists, both in economics and the law.

      1. The Household Production Function

        Becker's theories of the sexual division of labor and altruism in the family both rely on an extension of traditional utility maximization theory to include household activities. According to Becker, inside the household, "time and goods are inputs into the production of 'commodities,' which directly provide utility. These commodities cannot be purchased in the marketplace but are produced as well as consumed by households using market purchases." (27) In Becker's view, the utility function includes not only preferences for goods and services to be bought in the marketplace, but also preferences for the allocation of time between market work and household production and consumption. According to Becket, "full income is spent in part directly on market goods and in part indirectly on the time used to produce utility rather than earnings." (28)

        There are two aspects of Becker's extension of...

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